Periscopes are well known and widely used by submarine crews. When submarines are fully submerged under water, the crew uses a periscope to determine the above water surroundings of the submarine. The information that is obtained by the use of the periscope can be extremely valuable. Firstly, determining whether there are friendly or enemy vessels above the submarine is essential for the crew to be aware of for obvious reasons. Additionally, when the crew is interested in surfacing the submarine, they must be certain that there are no vessels floating above the water into which the submarine might collide.
There are numerous drawbacks that are associated with conventional periscopes. Periscopes are contained inside a periscope well within the ship's sail, the cylindrical chamber attached to the top of the submarine. A periscope well is required to run the entire height of the submarine in order to house the periscope. This restricts the arrangement of the sail and interior compartments. Furthermore, periscopes can accommodate only one person at a time. Additionally, the construction of periscopes is mechanically complicated, they add extra weight to the already heavily loaded submarine and they take a long time to rise to the surface.
US Publication No. 2003/0020829 attempts to overcome some of the drawbacks associated with conventional periscopes. The application describes a lengthy photonic buoy that is deployed from a submarine. An optical bench is positioned at the top of the buoy, in the section that floats above the waterline. The optical bench contains an imager which captures surface imagery and transmits it back to a remote workstation, located within the submarine, via fiber-optic cable. One limitation of this device is that due to the arrangement of the imager, the system is configured to provide only a panoramic view of the horizon. This includes essentially only a view of surface level objects, such as ships or land, not objects located above the surface level, such as flying vehicles.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a periscope that overcomes the limitations of the prior art devices.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a periscope that provides a view of not only the surface level, but even above surface level objects.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a periscope that transmits images to a remotely located workstation without the use of cable transfer lines.
It is still an object of the invention to use a tracking head of a missile as a submarine periscope, by sending the missile enclosed within its capsule to the water surface.
It is still another object of the present invention to use the images as obtained from the missile head as means for controlling other armament system within the submarine.
Other purposes and advantages of the invention will appear as the description proceeds.